


Final Frontier

by BookofOdym



Category: Green Lantern (Comics), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Fraternization, Hal in CW Verse, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 18:56:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16687105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BookofOdym/pseuds/BookofOdym
Summary: An exploration of Hal Jordan in the ArrowverseORHal and Barry develop a slow building relationship, but Hal's experiences with war and the death of a previous lover slow things down considerably.





	Final Frontier

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so my favorite origin for Hal is New Frontier, unfortunately, I needed to find some way to modernize it.  
> For those purposes I have invented a conflict, set in the fictional country of Modora (which is important to GL... or important to one of the Earth Villains, who will be a part of the story).  
> The secondary ship is one that I enjoy, but it still fulfills my thing with military fraternization. I hope people enjoy this fic but it's my first attempt at a longer one, I'm sorry.

Twenty-year-old Barry Allen’s feet pounded along the sidewalk, he could not be late to his first ever Forensic Serology Class. He had made a promise to himself that he wouldn’t be late to any of his classes this year, but his Genetics professor had let them out later than he was supposed to, and there was only one bus an hour.

Panicking, he lifted up his left arm to look at his watch. Crap. He only had five minutes.

A red motorcycle chose that moment to pull right up next to him. “Where are you headed?” The figure riding it asked, his face completely obscured by his black helmet. His voice sounded young, and when Barry seemed too shocked to reply he nodded behind him. “Get on.”

Barry shot him a suspicious look, but he had lost too much time, he had to trust this guy.

He swung his leg over the back of the bike and then they were off.

By some miracle, it turned out that he wasn’t walking into a kidnapping attempt and the leather-clad man actually drove him directly to his Lecture Theatre. To tell the truth, he drove straight between the barrier’s meant to keep vehicle’s away from the building and dropped Barry off right by the door.

“Hey,” the man said, pulling off his helmet to reveal curly brown hair, tanned skin, freckles and a face that looked around eighteen. “Can I wait for you out here?” He sounded a little nervous.

Barry gave him a warm smile. “Don’t you go anywhere.”

Hal, as he told Barry was his name when they’d found a suitable restaurant to have dinner in, said that he’d had to stop, he’d just been passing and when he saw a cute guy in trouble he’d had to pull over. Barry rolled his eyes at the conspicuous attempt at flirting.

“What’s Forensic Serology, though?” Hal asked, stirring his coke with a straw.

“It’s, uh, it’s bloodwork,” Barry wasn’t really sure if he could really explain the intricacies to someone who wasn’t a biologist. “What’s your major?”

“Aeronautical Engineering!” Hal apparently had no issue with talking about his major with someone who knew nothing about planes. The only thing that Barry understood about the ten minutes was that Hal was kind of cute with how into them he was.

“Hold on, I haven’t seen anything about that course at CCU.”

Hal took a long slurp from his drink. “Nah, I go to the Academy.”

“Academy?”

“Air Force Academy.”

Barry wracked his brains, trying to remember where that was. Then it hit him. “Why are you so far out of Colorado?!”

Hal pouted at him a little, and Barry hoped that the answer wasn’t going to be ‘I wanted to pick up cute guys.’ “Actually,” he said, “you guys start the week before us, and my brother goes to CCU, I was hoping to talk to him.”

Barry got the sense that there was something more going on there, and wasn’t sure if he wanted to get involved with someone else’s family drama, but at the same time Hal seemed like the type who could easily find trouble if he was left to his own devices and he didn’t exactly look like he knew where he was going.

Barry sighed, pulling out his phone, calling the one person he knew who seemed to know everyone else. “Hey Keith, I was wondering if you knew this one student. I’ve found his little brother.”

Hal leaned in closer. “His name’s Jack Jordan.”

“I heard,” Kenyon said when Barry opened his mouth to relay that information back to him. “I’ll send a car over to you.”

“Yeesh,” Barry said when he finally hung up. “I swear that guy’s a mob boss in the making.”

But true to his word, a black car pulled up beside right as they were leaving the diner. The driver rolled down his window. “Allen and Jordan?” He asked.

Barry nodded, wrapping a protective arm around Hal’s shoulders. He didn’t seem at all scared or nervous, but since they were about to step into a stranger’s car, Barry wanted to make it clear that he was off limits.

Hal tried to give him a comforting smile before he slid into the back seat of the car and Barry shook his head as he followed, was his concern really that obvious?

When they pulled up outside the apartment, they were greeted by a man who looked like an older version of Hal. Probably about four or five years older. He shot Hal a cold look. “What the Hell are you doing here?”

“I wanted to talk to you… I missed you.”

His brother’s face contorted with rage. “So, when I arrived home on your eighteenth birthday, only to find out that you had been missing for several hours? Did you miss you then?”

Hal actually looked ashamed at that, shuffling his feet. “You know that I had to-”

“What? Would your life be so worthless if you couldn’t fly planes? You decide that being a pilot is more important than your own family and what? You want to talk?”

Hal’s face looked like he’d been kicked in the stomach repeatedly. Barry wrapped his arm back around him, pulling him close, but his older brother continued.

“Don’t ever try to talk to me again.”

* * *

 

Hal woke up to a burning headache and the sound of his phone going off on his bedside table. He yelled at it to fuck off, but that seemed only to increase the loudness and the frequency of the beeps. Eventually, he had to give up and answer the damn phone.

“Hungover?” Came Ace Morgan’s voice on the other end, they had been on the same squadron during the Modoran conflict, but Hal didn’t know why he was hearing from him now. He hadn’t heard from anyone on the Force since his discharge.

“Alcohol isn’t my vice, and you damn well know it,” Hal replied, throwing himself back on the bed. Pilots indulging in cocaine was a stereotype, but it wasn’t one that he exactly broke.

“Not the kind of thing you should be telling me,” Ace gave a short laugh. “You up for a cross-desert trip today? Las Vegas?”

They had done that a lot, during their time off in the military, just travel to new places, go to bars and flirt with the locals. Las Vegas was a weird choice though. Hal didn’t have the money for Vegas. He wasn’t sure if he would ever have the money for Vegas. On the other hand…

“Four-hour trip? Not like I had anything else to do.” He had vague memories of calling up Jack last night, telling him that he loved him. Mushy shit like that. If he wanted to avoid the fallout, he should get out of Coast City in the next few hours.

They sped down the roads of the Nevada desert, driving onto the government land with no shame whatsoever. Hal had been trespassing on Air Force bases since he was eight years old, Martin Jordan had never been a particularly good influence, but mostly he just went up with his dates, showing them how flying felt.

“Oh man oh man oh man,” Hal cried out, as he leaped out of the car to run towards the plane, he looked as if he was about to hug it, or possibly steal it, which wouldn’t put him in good stead for Ace’s plans for him. He reached out to grab the furred collar of the flight jacket.

“F-35 Lightning II, single seat, stealth fighter,” Ace rattled off the list like he’d memorized the instruction manual.

“Can I fly it?”

“Hold it, Highball, that thing isn’t built to cruise at supersonic speeds,” the phrase ‘you crazy bastard, you’ll set back ten years of testing’ went unsaid.

Hal leaned on the car, staring up at the plane. “Single seat. You didn’t bring me here to renew my mile-high club membership then.”

“No! Jesus, stop doing that,” for a moment there he sounded as protective as a father, “the mile-high club’s only safe if you aren’t the guy flying the plane. Actually, you've seemed down in the dumps lately, brought you here to cheer you up.”

“I’m having trouble fitting in, Pappy, after the war, I was supposed to slide back into the military as a test pilot, but they dropped me like a stone. Jack still won’t talk to me and," he paused "I can’t fly, no one’ll take me.”

“Could always fly commercial.”

The offended expression on Hal’s face was truly something to behold.

“I took on the dangerous projects, Pappy, the ones that could kill me, the ones that had already killed others. If they hadn’t when I got put on them, I’d push the planes to their limits anyway. When I was a kid, I thought I would be able to touch the stars. I’ll never get there flying commercial.”

He took a sudden, sharp breath.

“Pappy, do you ever think about the men you’ve killed?”

Well, what could you say to that? Jordan had been a pacifist, had joined the military just to test planes, although you could argue all day about how those two desires clashed. When a rogue state had popped up in the middle of Europe though, the US had shipped him out the next day. They never talked about Modora, what had happened, but every so often Jordan would get a far-off look in his eyes, mumble a Slavic phrase, and shuffle off away from the group.

Whatever had happened to him had left him damaged goods, and part of him wanted to die. Part of him still wanted to reach for the stars, though, in a way that he couldn’t as another link in the chain of command.

“Got a pretty lady I want you to meet,” that seemed to perk Hal up instantly, and Ace rolled his eyes. “For a job, kid, please for the love of Christ do not flirt with Carol Ferris.”

Hal looked like he was weighing up his options.

“Flirting bad. Planes good. Flirting does not lead to planes.”

“Wait, did you set this up?” Jordan tackled him, enveloping him in a tight hug. “I won’t let you down, Pappy, I won’t. You’re amazing.”

* * *

 

He got the job with only minimal flirting, which Carol didn’t seem to mind, although she insisted that they were not to continue with any dalliances after he started working for her.

A sense of happiness was present in his life for the first time since he had come back from the war.

He felt like he could finally accomplish something.

That was when, for the first time in five years, his older brother contacted him.

A call at three in the morning to say that Cousin Larry had been in a particle accelerator explosion in Central City, and could he please come over as soon as he possibly could.

Hal arrived in the city that night, he rushed into the hospital at top speed, ignoring the shouts of a nurse telling him to stop running in the halls. He skidded into the room where his cousin was being kept. Both of his brothers looked up at him, Jim offered him a weak smile, but Jack was utterly unreadable.

“How- how is he?” He asked, trying to catch his breath.

Jack crossed the room in moments, wrapping him up in a hug, and Hal buried his face in his older brother’s chest in a way that he hadn’t done since he was a child.

In that moment everything that had happened between them was forgotten.

It turned out that they didn’t know when their cousin was going to wake up. They didn’t know if he would wake up. They just had to wait.

Hal ended up offering to go get the others food. Apparently, they hadn’t left Larry’s side in hours, skipping breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it was normal to get enough food to make up for what they missed, right?

It was when he was carrying back three large bags of food back upstairs that he ran into someone that he recognized. Hal knew that it must be strange that he could identify someone who he had only known for one night five years previously, but he figured that it was an ability he had been given in exchange for his complete lack of common sense.

“Iris?” He asked while she was still recovering from their sudden collision.

She had to glance down at the name tag on his jacket before a flicker of recognition crossed over her face. “What are you doing here?”

He looked directly over at the door of his cousin’s room. “My cousin was in some kind of… particle… explosion.”

She looked at him with complete understanding, which was honestly strange given how awful his explanation was. “Would you like to see Barry?” She asked.

She led him to a room where the man he had met all those years ago was lying in a bed, he looked quite a lot older, but that made sense, despite a few calls (which had all but stopped since the war broke out) they hadn’t met in person in five years.

Dropping the bags onto the table next to Barry, he gripped his hand. “Hey, it’s been a while, if it’s okay with you I’d like to visit more often…”

* * *

 

Unfortunately, he ended up being confined at his job, unable to even keep that simple promise.

At the end of the next week, he started his first drive towards Ferris Air. It was thirty minutes out of Coast City. Thirty minutes of desert. He hadn’t been expecting to see anyone at the side of the road. Especially not an Air Force Colonel.

“Oh great,” he sighed as the man gestured at him from the side of the road. “He’s waving me in.”

Now, he had to admit, if the man hadn’t been dressed in blues, he might not have minded pulling over for him, he’d probably have flirted just a little.

Course, when you were dealing with Colonels, there was every chance they’d get pissed.

“You Jordan?” The Colonel said, leaning into the car.

“That’s a roger, Colonel,” he replied, and the more he looked, the more it seemed like this guy was entirely his type. He wouldn’t have minded spending a couple of hours in the officer’s mess with him.

“I’m Colonel Flagg. Thought I’d come meet you special, kinda help you with the lay of the land.”

Huh. That was weird. Hal was sure that Ferris was supposed to be a civilian airfield.

“Didn’t realize that Ferris was an Air Force facility.”

The Colonel shot him a cold look. “For THIS project, and as far as you need to know. That’s exactly what it is. Are you reading me, Jordan?”

That was the moment that he realized that the next few months would be a living hell. “I surely am, Colonel, your reputation proceeds you.”

It soon became apparent that Colonel Richard Flagg was utterly insane. He’d snapped at a trio of scientists who were working on some kind of telekinetic helmet, snapped at Hal when he asked why they were doing that in an airplane testing facility (it turned out, after later discussion at lunch, that it was a Ferris Air project, not a US Air Force project, which honestly only resulted in more questions.), and finally shoved him into some metal cone that plummeted deep underwater.

He had a reputation in the military. Most of the Air Force guys avoided him like the plague and the one night that anyone had actually seen him in a military bar in Coast City (about three weeks after Hal started working with him) he had broken up a bar fight by just standing there and all the Marines had scattered in a way they never did under heavy gunfire.

Most of the pilots had frozen too, and quietly gone back to what they had been doing before the fight. Hal, unfortunately, hadn’t escaped without being approached. The Colonel ordered a cold bottle of beer, walked over to the booth that he had been sharing with some other Ferris guys and held the bottle up to Hal’s face, which had taken a beating back there. Everyone else in the booth ran away as if they had seen death himself.

“Jordan,” He said, eyes completely unreadable. “You are the single worst pugilist that I have ever met.”

Hal’s eyes traveled to the unconscious marine on the floor next to them meaningfully, he’d gone down in just one punch.

“He doesn’t count,” Flagg said blandly, “for one thing, I haven’t met him, and for another, he doesn’t spend half his days encouraging me to punch him.”

He paused. Then continued in a lower voice.

“Meet me at my quarters early tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday!” Hal protested, he wasn’t even supposed to be on call the next day.

He fully expected the colonel to make some regard about him being useless and lazy, but he regarded him with some interest. “Before Synagogue,” he said finally, and Hal was left wondering if Carol had told him about that little fact.

So that was how he had ended up rolling out of bed at four in the morning, pulling on a ratty pair of sweatpants and a grey t-shirt that was filled with holes. The sun hadn’t even risen yet, and he still found himself jogging over to the officers’ quarters. It took a long time for him to find the door he was supposed to be looking for, he had to knock on the first door he came across and ask them.

When he finally knocked on Flagg’s door, he was holding his arms around himself, the desert was freezing before the sun came up. He barely avoided the fist thrown at his face, throwing himself backward at the last minute. Of course, that meant that he fell on his ass.

He pulled his arm down from its defensive position in front of his face. “Are you insane?”

“Your reflexes are slow, you barely dodged that,” he offered a hand to help Hal up, somehow that felt like the strangest thing here. “Come in, I have a gym inside.”

The gym turned out to be a plain room with no decorations or amenities apart from the punching bag hanging in the center of it. Honestly, that was weird because all the other officers that Hal had known had something of their own lives in their quarters, even if it was just pictures of their wives.

He slipped on a pair of boxing gloves that had been left on the floor, taking a few experimental swings at the punching bag.

Strong arms came up to correct his stance, and a muscled chest pressed up against his back. Hal’s cock immediately started to take interest.

‘Hey!’ He mentally hissed downwards, ‘he tried to punch us in the face!’

For whatever reason, that thought just made his situation worse.

“Will you pay attention, Jordan?” Colonel Flagg hissed in his ear. Hal gave a visible shiver in response to that.

Eventually, he managed to get out of that training session alive and practically ran from the room, unfortunately with an order to come back at the same time every day.

Flagg really was crazy.

The fact that Hal jacked off at the thought of him in the shower that same day didn’t mean anything.

* * *

 

The next day, after being dunked in the big pond again, Hal was in a terrible mood. The Colonel’s continual mocking having wholly convinced him that whatever happened between them was a result of the combination of being trapped on the base for weeks, without sex and his general horniness.

He pushed open the hatch to get a view of Flagg smirking down at him. “That’s six drops now, you getting worn out yet?”

Hal looked him directly in the eyes as he spoke. “I could ride this bucket all day and all night.” The implication, of course, being that there were other things he could ride at any time.

The flicker of understanding in the man’s eyes was visible, but oddly enough, his smirk only grew.

As if spurred on by the tension between them Carol Ferris spoke up, probably wanting to avoid a macho fist fight on her property. “Well Colonel, what do you think?”

“Miss Ferris, it’s like I said before, he sure isn’t my first choice, but he’s definitely tough enough.”

It had been building up for a while, but the tension spilled over into an argument, and Hal found himself even more annoyed as he began to get changed in the locker room.

Hal felt a presence behind him as he pulled his shirt off and he took a look over his shoulder. Great. His own stick-up-the-ass Colonel was now following him around. “Didn’t get enough insults in?”

The man rushed forward, pressing him into the locker in front of him.

“Why are you flirting with me?” He hissed into Hal’s ear, and Hal swung around in his arms to face him.

“It should be obvious,” Hal murmured, and then their lips smashed together.

That night, all of the pilots were talking in their dorm.

“I’ve had it, you know?” Hal grimaced at the cards in his hand, he was definitely going to be losing all his money again, when he looked up again everyone at the table was looking at them in interest. “Flagg and his creepy gang. Swear they’re all nuts.”

“You don’t know the half of it, Highball,” one of the other men said, he was an O-4 and had been involved with the ‘creepy gang’ much longer than anyone else. “Flagg and his squad are all top security clearance brass, right? But they’re all certified, like, short a brick or two.”

The story was long, and the officer who told it was probably spreading more national secrets than his career was worth, but the gist of it was that every member of Flagg’s crew had, at some point in their long, distinguished military careers, completely broken down.

Worst of the group was apparently Colonel Richard Flagg Senior, who had buried so many men that no one could keep up and had been tasked to lead teams of criminals into missions that had no chance of survival.

This was, according to the rumor mill, proof enough that Flagg felt nothing at their deaths.

What he was doing at Ferris Air now, no one knew.

“If I was you, Highball, I’d find out what I’m getting into.”

* * *

 

“Sir?” Hal knocked just once before stepping into Flagg’s office, not even waiting for a response. The Colonel didn’t even look up. He tried again. “I wanted to talk to you about what happened in the mess.”

Flagg snapped his folder shut. “I’ve told you before, Jordan, you might think I’m crazy, but that doesn’t make you any different.”

“Actually,” Hal said, stepping further into the room. “I don’t think you’re crazy. You know what happened to me after I killed one person. If I had to see more people die, thousands of people die, I’d crack, and I’d crack worse.”

Flagg’s eyes twitched slightly, it was hard to tell in which direction. “Should have flown commercial, Jordan.”

“Surprised you’re upset about lunchtime gossip, Sir,” Hal said as he settled down in the second chair, resting his chin on one of his hands.

“I’m not.”

“The boys said they wanted me to know what I was getting into,” Hal swung his legs under the desk casually. “Thing is, I already know what I’m getting into.”

Flagg raised an eyebrow at him. “Which is?”

“I did feel your cock pressing up against me when we made out.”

He only got a sigh in return. “Don’t be crass, Jordan.”

The Colonel didn’t respond to any further prodding, so Hal stood up, wandering over to the hat stand in the corner of the room. Careful not to scuff it, he picked up the uniform hat that was propped on the stand and placed it on his own head.

“Jordan.” Came the sharp voice from the desk.

“I was just-” He started, but Colonel Flagg was already right in front of him, he tugged the hat off of Hal’s head, but he made no effort to move away once he’d claimed his property.

“Sir?” Hal asked, only to feel a pair of lips press up against his own softly.

“Is that what you wanted when you came to bother me, Jordan?”

“Well, no,” he pressed his fingers to his lips experimentally. “I actually wanted to make sure whatever weird ass thing we had wasn’t ruined but…”

He wondered if this was the first time he’d ever seen Flagg genuinely smile. “Out, Jordan. I’ll visit you tonight.”

 


End file.
